Friday, December 30, 2011

Making the Best of It

JP Auclair Street Segment (from All.I.Can.)Sherpas Cinema on Vimeo.
I watched this video this morning and was moved, moved to find ways to make the most of it. Here is this guy skiing down hill, which is nothing spectacular, but he's not skiing down a frosted slope lined with pines, hearing only the sound of his own skis swishing through the snow. He's going down hill in a town dreary from a long winter, surrounded by houses and cars, hearing barking dogs and the noises of small-town traffic.

I'm imagining his peripheral vision as a wash of color painted with a wet brush—he sees the smear of grungy snow and ice piled high along the road, carved into at crosswalks and side streets. It's interrupted by leftover Christmas decorations, stop signs, clothes on the line. Under a sky the color of dishwater, he dodges a threatening snowball, maneuvers down steps and over parked cars.

He finally gets to the bottom and unclamps his skis, and then he boards a bus headed back uphill, to do it all over again. It's going to be great, even better the second time.

I know this video clip is part of a feature-length film about climate change—I've read the description and would like to see the full version. But for the moment, this clip represents something else to me. It represents an approach to the day-to-day. It represents determination and one of my favorite characteristics humans possess, a need and an ability to take something seemingly unpleasant and turn it into something palatable.

In 2012, we're all going to find ourselves in some unpleasant, or at least not preferable, situations. You know we are. The trick is going to be turning those situations into something palatable, or even better, something preferable. I'll choose that. I'll choose it so much that I'll get on the Up Hill bus to go back to the top and do it all over again.

Happy New Year, Blogville and all those who stop by looking for Trail bologna or a recipe for Johnny Marzetti or information about Romania and find me instead. Let's make the best of it.

1 comment:

Yay! That was fun! I love the bus at the end. Thank you for that, Robyn and a very Happy New Year to you and the family.You do realise that when it next snows you're going to have to get some skis and head out there with Baxter to make your own version of the movie (even if you just hitch him up like a huskie and get him to tow you into town - I know you've done dog-sledding so you've got no excuses … hee hee).